Class Introduction: Doctors

If you want to play a class with a strong focus on supporting others, a Doctor may be the right choice for you. As a generally short-range buffing class, the most complicated aspect of playing one is remembering what the requirements are for use of various abilities - this usually amounts to effectively having to remember a few extra per-encounter calls. Some of their skills have a slightly different effect in Vision Quests too, though this doesn't require remembering much besides slightly different Vision Quest stats and one special ability there.

1. Doctors are probably the class that make least use of their class resource, but it's there for emergencies. Doctor skills, like this physical plane heal, typiclly have the following requirements: to be close range (touching the target with medical implements), for some skills an amount of time which must be spent, and for some skills a limit to the number of uses per encounter. Use of Urgency allows you to bypass one of these requirements. For instance, here this Doctor is at close range and still has a use of the skill left, but is spending one Urgency to do the healing instantly.

2. Say that Mage who just got healed goes off and gets injured again, and they come back to the Doctor for more healing. Having used up his last use of the skill, he now uses Urgency to bypass the third requirement above, to get an extra use of it. It's still necessary in this case to spend the 15s it would normally take to use the skill, because without having a special skill you can't spend a second Urgency to bypass the timer like before.

3. The Mage now goes off and starts fighting. To provide them with extra hits, which is instant and still has uses left this encounter, the Doctor can now bypass the first requirement above and do this at range by spending a final Urgency. To do this requires having already used your Doctor abilities on the target - in this case the Mage was healed earlier, so that's all good.

4. As a final aside not directly related to Urgency, which has less use in a Vision Quest - for some reason, a number of a Doctor's skills change during a Vision Quest to instead grant use of the “Preventative Medicine” ability which gets easier to use the more of these skills they have. This involves them ripping things which they don't consider to be people (ie. not the rest of the party) apart at a distance seemingly with their mind! Apparently the knack for doing this just seems to come naturally to them. Isn't that a little creepy? What's with that?

At low level, Doctors will typically have a basic physical heal and a few basic buffs, each with a number of uses per encounter to remember (along with the 15s timer on the heal). There are only a few skills which have different Vision Quest effects, but it is possible you will need to know how Preventative Medicine works.

At high level, Doctors have a wider range of buffs and more uses of some of their skills. Each will have a number of uses per encounter to remember, and a couple of them also have timers to remember. By this point it should be simpler to remember which ones differ in a Vision Quest, though, and most of the ones which do have an alternative effect at least have the same alternative effect. Once you know how Preventative Medicine works, you only need to adjust how often you can call damage with it as you acquire new skills that provide it.

A possible basic build for a Doctor is:

• Combat Proficiency (Free)
• Field Medicine 1
• Bolster
• Protect
• Leave Me Alone
• Light Armour 1

This starting build focuses on being able to heal and buff others, with the ability to grant some VOIDs and extra hits to party members as well as some healing. For extra survivability Light Armour bumps you up to 10 hits in the physical world and grants a VOID, and you can discourage people from attacking you whilst you're busy healing with a BE PUSHED. In Vision Quests, you also have extra hits (at 6 Spirit hits) and a VOID, but alongside your buffs focus on dealing damage with Preventative Medicine as opposed to healing.

Ready to try creating a Doctor? The full description along with class skill tree and descriptions can be found here - you get Combat Proficiency from the Weapon Skills tree for free, and you'll need to pick 5 other level 1 skills (plus more for any additional XP you're adding) from these sets of skills:

• Doctor Skills
• General Skills
• Weapon Skills

For a Doctor, you can generally build how you like - focus on class skills for a more supportive build focused on healing and buffing (or add Physician Heal Thyself to the mix and use these more to boost yourself), or go for more Weapon Skills and have some class skills on the side to fall back on when things start going wrong. You also have the option of taking General Skills which provide extra spirit hits and focusing on Class skills which grant Preventative Medicine for a more Vision Quest-focused build, but this isn't recommended as a first character or an easy option.

Armed with this information, you can then complete the remaining steps of Character Creation.